Results of Secret
Nazi Breeding Program: Ordinary Folks *

WERNIGERODE,
Germany, Nov. 4 — For Guntram Weber, the
journey that led to this quaint town of
horse-drawn carts and half-timbered houses was
long, wrenching, and anything but redemptive.

Four years ago,
Mr. Weber discovered that his father was not, as
his mother had told him, a young soldier who
died honorably on the battlefield during World
War II. Instead, he was a high-ranking SS
officer, who oversaw the deaths of tens of
thousands of people while stationed in what is
now western Poland.

“He died
peacefully in Argentina, with his old comrades
standing at his grave and raising their right
arms,” Mr. Weber said, his voice thick with
anger and grief. “A racist is forever a racist.”

As Mr. Weber,
63, told his story to a hushed room of mostly
gray-haired men and women here, there were
sympathetic nods, but little surprise. Most had
their own tales of deceit and discovery, life
histories that proved to be homespun fairy
tales, the dark truth buried under layers of
silence.

These are the
children of the Lebensborn, an SS program
devised to propagate Aryan traits. On this
chilly weekend, they gathered here in a corner
of central Germany to share their stories, and
to speak publicly, for the first time, about the
horror of finding out they had been bred to be
the next generation of Nazi elite.

“This is the
opposite example of the Holocaust,” said Gisela
Heidenreich, 63, a family therapist from
Bavaria, whose mother was unmarried and whose
father, she later discovered, was a senior SS
officer. “The idea was to further the Aryan race
by whatever means were available.”

Lebensborn, or
spring of life, refers to a series of clinics
scattered throughout Germany and neighboring
countries, to which pregnant women, most of them
single, went to give birth in secret. They were
cared for by doctors and nurses employed by the
SS, the Nazi Party’s feared paramilitary unit.

One such clinic
sits at the top of a gentle hill in Wernigerode,
a remote town near the Harz Mountains. The
building, long abandoned now, was part of a
bittersweet homecoming tour for the 40 or so
people who turned out for the meeting of an
association known as Traces of Life.

To be
accepted into the Lebensborn, pregnant women had
to have the right racial characteristics —
blonde hair and blue eyes — prove that they
had no genetic disorders, and be able to prove
the identity of the father, who had to meet
similar criteria. They had to swear fealty to
Nazism, and were indoctrinated with
Hitler’s ideology while they were in
residence.

Many of the
fathers were SS officers with their own
families. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS,
encouraged his men to sire children outside of
marriage as a way of building a German master
race.

About 6,000 to
8,000 people were born in these clinics in
Germany between 1936 and 1945. Because of the
program’s secrecy, most were not told for
decades the circumstances of their births or the
identities of their fathers, which were not
recorded on their birth certificates. Some still
do not know the truth.

Only in the last
20 years, as the wall of silence began
crumbling, have researchers been able to
document the Lebensborn program. They have
knocked down some prurient myths: that these
clinics were Nazi bordellos, stocked with
flaxen-haired breeders ready to mate with SS
men.

“The children
were conceived in all the usual ways: love
affairs, one-night stands, and so forth,” said
Dorothee Schmitz-Köster, who has written a book
about Lebensborn. “Abortion
was not legal in Germany then, and in many
cases, the women did not want to keep the
babies.”

Some of the
mothers gave them up for adoption to SS
families. Others raised the children alone,
telling them that their fathers had been killed
in the war. Having given birth to illegitimate
babies in a fervently Nazi setting, the mothers
faced a double stigma in postwar Germany.

Many lived out
their lives in grim silence, their children say.
Some developed psychological problems or turned
to alcohol. For the children, the discovery of
the truth was equally traumatic.

Mr. Weber, a
creative writing teacher in Berlin, is still
struggling to come to grips with his recently
uncovered roots. Some hints from family members,
followed by research, led him to the truth.
Among his more unpleasant discoveries: his
godfather was Himmler.

“Most grew up
knowing they had a secret,” Ms. Schmitz-Köster
said. “They were angry at their mothers, because
they had been lied to or abandoned. Some feel
shame. There are also a small number who are
proud of being Lebensborn. They feel they are
part of an elite.”

For Lebensborn
children born outside Germany, life was even
harsher. In Nazi-occupied Norway, for example,
the SS established a clinic because Himmler
valued the appearance of Scandinavians. Those
babies, born of Norwegian mothers and German
soldiers, were branded as children of the enemy
after the war, and faced pitiless
discrimination.

Other children
who met Himmler’s pernicious racial standards
were kidnapped as infants from their families in
Nazi-occupied countries and sent to Germany,
where proper Nazi families raised them.

If anything, the
reunion served as proof that racial engineering
has its limits. The Germans here looked no
different from those at any other gathering of
Germans in their golden years: the men with
salt-and-pepper beards and balding pates, the
women with eyeglasses and frosted hair.

“I’m really an
exception,” said Ms. Heidenreich, a tall woman
with long blond hair and bright blue eyes.

Ms. Heidenreich,
the first of the Lebensborn children to write a
book about her experience, argues that the
program, sinister as it was, has echoes in
today’s world. With advances in genetics, she
notes, discriminating parents will soon be able
to select traits in their unborn children.

Given that
possibility, she said, the evils of the Nazi era
must not be allowed to recede into the history
books. “If we start engineering blond-haired,
blue-eyed babies, can we blame just Hitler?” she
said.

Ms. Heidenreich
was born in a clinic in Oslo, although her
parents were German. Her mother chose to give
birth there to get as far away as possible from
the village in Bavaria where she had grown up.
Ms. Heidenreich was not told about her
background but became suspicious after watching
a television documentary about the Lebensborn
children.

Today, she has
trouble reconciling the kindly figure her mother
became in later years with the committed Nazi
she had been. “She was a lovely grandmother,
even if she was a horrible mother,” she said.

Not everybody
has had a fraught experience. Ruthild Gorgass,
who was born here, said her mother told her
about the circumstances of her birth when she
was a teenager. Ms. Gorgass had some contact
with her father, a manager for a chemical
factory, who had another family.

Her mother left
her a photo album with an account of her stay in
Wernigerode. She had recalled it as an idyllic
time, though she had expressed distaste for her
daughter’s naming ceremony, in which the baby
was placed before an altar bearing a swastika.

“I was really
lucky because I had a talkative mother,” said
Ms. Gorgass, 64, a retired physical therapist.

As she thumbed
through the album, she put on a pair of reading
glasses. Peering over them, she said with smile:
“My eyes aren’t perfect. We’ve got all the same
illnesses and disabilities as other people
have.”

Tuesday,
4 February, 2003

Norway's Nazi legacy

Many Lebensborn children were put in
psychiatric hospitals after the war

Norway's outcasts from Nazi past

For fifty
years they have been Norway's outcasts. They grew up in
shame, believing they were outsiders and bearing their guilt
in silence.

They were
the children born during the Nazi occupation whose mothers
were local women and whose fathers were German soldiers. The
Nazis classified everyone in terms of race and Aryan
Norwegians were highly prized.

Those born
of German fathers and Norwegian mothers were considered
first-class Aryans. The Norwegians called them "Krigens
Barn" (War Children) and treated them with suspicion and
prejudice.

Women who
had personal relationships with Germans during the war were
frowned upon in Norway. There was also official hostility
against such women as the Norwegian government in exile in
the UK, via the BBC, broadcast that "things would grow
unpleasant for them after the Germans left Norway". They
were right. Thousands of women were jailed after the war.

Lebensborn a product of Nazi eugenics programme

During the
German occupation of Norway some of the children were
separated from their mothers and cared for in so-called
"Lebensborn" clinics ("Fountain of Life" clinics).

They were to
be raised as the conqueror's racial elite, part of Heinrich
Himmler's Aryan inspired ideology of using eugenics to
create racial purity.

After the
Germans retreated from Norway at the end of the war, many of
these children were subjected to humiliation and
degradation. Some found themselves in childrens' homes and
orphanages where they were bullied and tormented and even
sexually abused.

Others were
classified as "Retarded" and shut away in mental
institutions due to the bizarre theory that their mothers
must have been mad to have slept with a German - by
definition, subnormal too.

Werner Thiermann with a photograph of his
German father

Werner
Thiermann was born in October 1941. His mother was one of
the local domestic staff working at a German base in
Lillehammer. His father was a staff sergeant in the Wermacht
and Werner was officially listed as a Lebensborn child -
number 1242.

Werner never
met his father - he was posted away soon after his mother
became pregnant and she never heard from him again.

After years
of searching Werner found out that he had died in a Russian
POW camp at the end of the War. After the liberation of
Norway, Werner's mother had her head shaved and was interned
with other "collaborators" on an island in Oslo harbour.

Lebensborn
children were the living symbol of German occupation and as
such were often mistreated.

Young Werner
spent his childhood in a succession of children's homes and
orphanages where he was beaten and abused - both physically
and sexually.

This legacy
has left Werner bitter against his fellow Norwegians who,
for fifty years, have closed off this chapter in Norway's
history.

Official
silence is breaking

The official
silence on Lebensborn children is beginning to break down as
people like Werner Thiermann trace their parents and
undertake legal action to gain compensation for their
mistreatment.

Randi
Spiedevold, a lawyer, has taken up the case of a group who
endured the Lebensborn program. Randi grew up after the war
but until taking on this case she knew nothing of the
Lebensborn programme or the suffering that children endured.

Randi Spiedevold is fighting the case for
compensation

She feels
shame for the way these people have been treated and "was
really, really surprised because so many people had knew
about this and never said anything.

"And when
you see, look at Norway as the Nobel Peace Prize country and
we are going out through all the world telling people how to
behave in war, after war and how we have to excuse
everything and behave in a proper way towards the suffering
people. It's amazing why we had to do these things with our
own children."

Many of
those children born to German fathers and Norwegian mothers
face a continuing struggle over their identity and still
feel misfits in Norwegian society. Today many feel they will
never really fit in their own society unless they get
justice.

The
Norwegian Prime Minister publicly apologised last New Year
to the Lebensborn children for the way they had been
treated.

After fifty
years Norway has begun to acknowledge the terrible
consequences of the Nazis' genetic ambitions. The case of
compensation for the Lebensborn children is still awaiting
trial.